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Health IT

A survey of senior information technology and security professionals in healthcare found the most likely source of a data breach to be email—which the vast majority of respondents admitted to using frequently to transfer protected health information and consider critical to their organization.

Optum, the consulting and services arm of health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, announced at the launch of a $250 million venture capital fund investing in data analytics and digital health firms.

David Shulkin, MD, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, asked a House committee to redirect $782 million of his agency’s budget to begin the switch from the VA’s legacy electronic health record system to a new Cerner platform.

Like most healthcare conventions this year, the 2017 meeting of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) featured plenty of talk about healthcare policy coming out of Washington, D.C. With much of the attention taken up by the Affordable Care Act’s future, AHIMA’s leaders were considering the future of a different law: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

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Last year didn’t see healthcare breaches on the scale of the Anthem hack of 2015, but there were still 450 reported breaches in 2016 affecting more than 27 million patient records, as reported in the "Breach Barometer Report: Year in Review” by Protenus.

Issues with the October 2016 ICD-10 update mean CMS can’t process certain quality measure data for the last quarter of the year, so the agency will waive penalties related to the glitch’s impact on the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS).

About 171,000 Medicare eligible professionals (EPs) will be hit with a 3 percent downward payment adjustment this year for failing to show meaningful use (MU) under the Medicare Electronic Health Record Incentive Program in 2015.

To go over some of the policy victories for health IT within the 21st Century Cures Act, including the extra funding for major IT initiatives, HealthExec spoke with Alan Portela, CEO and board chairman of mobile interoperability platform AirStrip.

While the final rule implementing the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) will allow practices to submit only some data in 2017, CMS doesn’t have the IT infrastructure in place to collect it.

Using automated calling services to help patients manage their own health can produce some benefits, according to a review by Cochrane, but it doesn’t appear to be a replacement for follow-up calls between healthcare professionals and patients.

What if hackers of health systems’ computer networks weren’t looking to make money off ransomware attacks or identity theft, but they were instead aiming to harm patients? They might be to pull it off, according to one cybersecurity expert, if facilities fail to separate their networks.